I got funded from Saskatoon Tribal Council!!!!! 😀 I am getting six months of income support while I work full time on my business. I have to write a report in three months and then another report at the end of the six months. And go in every month to sign a paper for expenses so I can get paid.

I’m pretty happy. I found out on Tuesday and today I finally got to sign my paper for January’s money, so I called my worker this afternoon and cancelled welfare. YAY! I am not on WELFARE ANYMORE!!! I can make money and not be sneaky! Whew, that’s good because I got four hundred bucks from a screening this month! I love when random artist fees come in.

In a few weeks, like maybe three weeks, I should know if I got my Sask Arts Board grant. I hope I did, otherwise I have to rearrange my whole residency in Hamburg. But so far I have had some money luck, so I hope it continues.

Grandpa and I were in the backseat of the car and he started singing “Meewasin, meewasin, meewasin soniyas!” and taking out some money to give to Mum for Sunday dinner. In English that would be “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful money!”

I think I am going to sing that song next time I get money!

I’ve been thinking seriously about making an extremely low budget feature film from my screenplay Bunnyhug. I think I still look young enough that I could play the lead role, which would cut down on actors fees. I think I could do a bare bones version with minimal video equipment and spending most of the budget on actors and crew. It’s a film about extremely poor people too, so locationwise it shouldn’t be too difficult to find a set. I’m not needing a mansion, that’s for sure! I think that is what my next grant application at Canada Council will be for. And if I did a feature with Canada Council money and it was moderately successful (as in finished) I could go on to Telefilm money for bigger projects in the future.

I just think I really want to make narrative feature films, and I may as well start now. I have a whole blueprint for a movie, and it entertains me when I read it. It’s a love story but really it’s about insanity. I think it’s important. And funny. Funny is good. And I know how to use my camera and I can edit and I can direct and act (actually I am a decent actor). Who knows, maybe I can even rent my mom’s basement apartment for a couple weeks to shoot in.

It’s ambitious, but I think I can do it. And I’ve been thinking about this project since 2003, I’ve planned all kinds of things about it. I know how I want lines delivered and what I want the set to look like and props I will have to collect. I know all their interior motivations and I’ve plotted how the edits will go.

Plus I need a big project to work on. I made a documentary feature, but I really want to get into drama. And who knows, maybe it will set the stage for me getting Telefilm money for Mars: The Maiden Voyage.

So that is what I am thinking about.

Monday I will get my footage back from the lab. That reminds me, I have to call and book the projector for Tuesday! And my video camera still needs to be cleaned, dammit! I will have to rent a mini dv video camera from PAVED for a day. I should have done that volunteer work, then I could have gotten production credits.

Tis a crazy life, to be a presently sane filmmaker.

My mom and grandparents went to my Uncle Doug’s company lunch today. It was nice, I was sitting across from his cameraman and we got to talk shop.

Oh and I have to buy some sharpies.

I think it’s gonna be a good little film.

There was some drama in my house the other day, my cousin’s ex/still sort of girlfriend yelled at my mom, in her own house, the nerve! It pissed me off. I like having a happy home and I really resent people bringing negativity into the house. And verbal abuse is not to be tolerated. UGH! It brings me back to being concerned about who I end up with for a partner. I don’t want someone who makes me feel bad.

Then Mom pointed out that someone I like makes me feel little and small. And I thought about it and I was like “Holy shit, you’re right!” It irked me. I don’t like feeling little and small, because I am not. I have a decent career, even if I have not made a million dollars off the back end of a five minute short. And I am doing things all the time.

But the other concerning thing about the verbally abusive episode in my house yesterday is that I don’t want someone elses bad attitude to negatively impact my stability which I have worked SO FUCKING HARD ON for years! I’m not interested in being some unstable person’s punching bag, or for my mother to be the punching bag either. It really upsets me. Stress isn’t good for people with bipolar disorder, and it has precipitated my episodes in the past. So after living with mom for over a year and falling into a decent living arrangement, I don’t want everything to get fucked up and higgledy piggledy! Aw fuck I think I spelled that wrong, oh well.

I saw my psychiatric nurse a couple of days ago. She wants me to approach the Partnership through the Schizophrenia Society to do public speaking with my mom about my recovery from bipolar disorder. I think I am going to do it. I could do like, five talks a year or something. I could do more, but I am going to start off reasonably.

She also told me she thought I was very gracious when I was all overmedicated and in a group home for months. She thinks that I might never have another big episode if I stay on my meds, and continue to do other things that aid my little brain, like getting proper sleep and eating right and stuff.

I really hope so. I don’t think I could handle another manic episode, I would feel like my whole life was unraveling all over again.

Hey hey hey it has been ten days since I had a smoke! 😀 I am doing good! I’m really committed to not smoking this time, yesterday I sort of hit a wall and kept thinking about smokes, but I persevered!

Tomorrow at 2:30pm Saskatchewan time (which isn’t on daylight savings time so it always switches between being Central and Mountain and I never remember which is which) it will have been SEVEN DAYS since I quit smoking! My first whole week smoke free! It feels pretty good. I have one nicotine mint when I wake up and then my coffee and lunch and another nicotine mint and then a drink of pop and then another mint a couple hours later. It’s going well. I’ve been feeling pretty positive about it and my self esteem is even improving, which is nice. I feel like shit about myself when I am a smoker. Because I know I shouldn’t do it and most of the time didn’t even want to do it but I had to do it. Smoking, yuck! What a terrible addiction!

My sense of smell is coming back, and hot apple drink tastes SUPER yummy these days. But I think the biggest change I have noticed is I don’t have cold hands and feet anymore. My circulation has improved immensely. It’s nice to have something substantial like that to appreciate about smoking cessation.

So aside from that, I am still waiting to hear from STC. I helped put up the christmas lights today. I saw my sister tonight at her group home and she fell asleep while I was hugging her. Last night I read almost all of the articles on Quit Smoking at About.com. I had a crazy weekend but it was fun and positive.

Rejection sucks ass, but I am feeling better about myself these days. I harbour hope that one day I will have a totally healthy life long relationship with someone. I don’t know when it will happen. But I don’t mind being single. I’ve had some flirtatious action in the last few years at least, so it’s not like those other years of NOTHING! They just fizzle out like dud firecrackers though, my little flirtations. It’s been a weird pattern but maybe I should be relieved, like it is keeping me from being in relationships that wouldn’t make me happy.

Still I do worry that my relationship skills are totally out of practice. And my parents split when I was two so I never grew up around a relationship, like the day to day aspects of a relationship. I feel like I am kind of making it up as I go along. If I was still living across from a Chapters I would probably go sit in there and read the self help section on communication in relationships and stuff.

Maybe I am also thinking of this because of my cousin’s relationship, which I have been observing ever since he moved in with us. It’s not a good scene. It makes me think about my past relationships and how long I would try to withstand cruel behaviour just before it all unraveled. I think to myself “Oh if only I had had a backbone and would just have confronted them as soon as they starting saying mean things!” I think, from what I have noticed, people sometimes (well, often) gauge how badly they can treat their partner before their partner won’t take it anymore, and if they can get away with treating them like garbage then they WILL!

Oh man, that is really pessimistic.

My first real girlfriend lived in Toronto while I was in Vancouver, and only talked to me on the phone once every two weeks. Even if I would call her wanting to talk a week later because something came up, she would keep it to every two weeks. And that went on for a year and a month! Now I look back on it and think “Oh gawd, how controlling!”

So I get crushes and then later on they kind of fizzle out after I start noticing weird behaviour or other indications of possible relationship drama. And I’m not talking mental illness, I could date another person with a mental illness, enough of my own friends are really nutters anyway, one more nut wouldn’t wreck my world. I just mean people who like making people jealous and that kind of weird gamey behaviour. That’s what I can’t stand.

Red Flags is what I’m talking about!

I am wary.

Because I don’t need a girl to make me feel like a loser! I can feel like a loser all by myself. But BLAH! Who wants to feel like a loser, nobody, that’s who!

I am very highly suspicious of people who want their partners to change fundamental aspects of who they are. I think you should love someone for who they are, not for what you want them to become. People’s growth and change comes from a core within themselves, they have to want it for themselves. They can’t do it for other people. Even if EVERYBODY wants them to change! I don’t believe in interventions either.

Well, I think I am going to get away from this confessional blog and go make myself some Hot Apple Drink to take to bed with me, where I will finish reading about butch and femme and maybe jot some totally embarrassing feelings about a certain someone who will remain nameless in my journal. Which is almost ALL WRITTEN IN! I started it in April 2008 when I moved into the coop! Hundreds of pages and many deep dark secrets later I am almost DONE! I have eight pages left. I am going to have to go diary hunting this december. Either that or write in that cute Marlene Dietrich book I got, but I don’t feel as secure about the binding of it for a long term document like a journal. I am very fussy about my journals.

It’s now been well over three days that I have been smoke free. It’s going well, but right now I am partying and there are cigarettes around and I have already been offered some but I am holding fast to my obligations not to smoke. I quit with the beer a few hours ago and am just drinking water now, but the partying continues and with it so do the urges to smoke.

What it really is is that this is the first time in a long time that I have partied without smoking. I have to learn how to do it without reaching for a cigarette.

My Super 8 made it to the lab and should be here in time for Christmas. So I will have lots of time to draw all over it. Yay!

I’m feeling positive about my life. I think I’m going to be okay. I just need a little more direction. I have some shows coming up and I am producing again and my creativity is reviving.

Being diagnosed bipolar really kicked my career in the ass. It took a long time to learn how to live with it. And it always takes a while to recover. From those BIG episodes. Sheesh. It fucks me over for about a year.

But it’s been since 2007 that I had a big episode, so I am glad. I value my mental health.

I never did win NaNoWriMo with a 50,000 word novel. I did however end up with 19 pages of an autobiography about madness. I think I might have to expand on it though, I mean what I write about, because there’s only so much you can say about madness before it gets redundant. My manias and depressions have been pretty similar to each other. I mean, the situations are always different but I always end up feeling like a Messiah or someone who should be dead. It’s kinda predictable.

So yes, I am still going to work on my novel, it just will take longer than one month. And who knows, maybe next year I will write a novel in a month.

I haven’t had a cigarette in 33 hours! I feel pretty proud of that, but I also realize I need a little hobby for my hands to be busy. So I am going to learn how to knit. I am starting off with a scarf. Just a really basic scarf. I hope it doesn’t roll up into a tube, but even if it does I will have something warm and handmade by me around my neck. Tomorrow I go out to pick up some yarn for it, and some number 7 knitting needles. KNITTING!

My Grandma used to knit a lot, so in a way it feels like something I am compelled to do. I don’t have anything she knit for me anymore either, which makes me sad. But maybe I can make some new knitted things. She once made me the best mittens ever, they were purple and the insides were another layer of thinner but softer pink yarn. They were so warm! I loved them and I had them for over a decade, but they weren’t on a string so one day one got lost. And the other followed a year later.

Some friends of mine invited me to join their knitting group, so hopefully soon I can sit around with friends all knitting and doing other artsy crafty things.

I shot my Super 8 film for the 8 fest, but I still have more work to do. When it comes back from the Lab I have to draw on it with a sharpie to simulate blindness, mine in particular. I used to get ocular migraines and the edges of my vision would start to turn white until everything was white except the very middle of my vision. They are scary to have. I think they were related to my oncoming manic depression, because I got them when I was in 6th grade up to second year of university. They come on really fast, so often I would be walking from point A to point B when they occurred. And crossing a street trying to see the walk light when you are half blind is scary as hell. Also I want to talk in my film about my cousin’s blindness and how it is related to his schizophrenia. He stabbed himself in the eyes almost two years ago after going off his medications. So sad.

Also I have to record some audio for my film and edit it and make a little mp3 on a cd for the 8 Fest to play alongside my film. So there is still some work to be done. But I am happy to report it will be done in January in time for the 8 Fest. And the day after it screens I will post it onto my facebook. Maybe some girl will be attracted by my filmmaking skillz.

So creatively I am doing very well. I have been producing things anyway, which always makes me feel good about myself. I don’t feel good when I am not able to be creative.

Also I spend too much damn time on Facebook. But I am always immersed in websites. I used to be on Open Diary all the time. Now I hardly ever visit. But if I knit I can do something with my hands that is productive besides writing facebook statuses.

I am going to hear in January if I got my grant to make a video about being butch, and do a residency in Hamburg while I finish editing it. So I really hope I get it. It would be awesome! 😀 I only applied for 6000, I hope that’s enough. I will have to pay my 500 rent here AND a plane ticket and money to live on in Germany including 60 euros for the rent over there. Also money to make the video, including paying my minimal crew and renting equipment. I think I can do it. I am going to buy the ticket as soon as I can, because then I will get a way cheaper fare.

Oh mans, it’s late! I should go get Little Mister and go to bed. I was hearing this squeaking in the kitchen and it was tripping me out man! Probably a mouse.

I am supposed to go to Australia next year. I am super excited about this, having NEVER gone that far away and also because of the Aborigine culture in Australia. I am not excited about the racism there, but is it worse than in Canada? Canada is pretty racist. All you have to do is read the comments section of the Globe and Mail or CBC to see it in action.

Also all this furor over Attawapiskat. So many people are blaming the band and council, even though they had so little to work with. For those of you from outside of Canada, Attawapiskat is a reserve in Manitoba where the housing situation is so dismal that people are living in condemned housing and tents even in the winter. The government says they had 90 million to build homes, but after everything is taken into account they really only got five million in six years to build new homes, and most of that went to education (they didn’t have a school for a while). Now they have been placed under 3rd party management, which basically means the governments that fucked them over have more power over how they spend their money. It’s a slap in the face.

I am really working hard on quitting smoking. It’s not going very well, but I am still going to try hard! My cousin gave me three beers and it weakened my resolve. But I am still determined tomorrow morning I am not going to have that first smoke!

What else should I talk about? Well, Mister the therapy dog (because he’s not really a service dog) has been getting along well. I was worried getting a dachshund that his back would have problems, but there was only one week where he yelped a few times when he would play with the other dogs too hard, and so he is actually doing pretty good. His injury or whatever it was healed and now he is back to his rough and tumble self. He wrestles with Hermione, the other dachshund, and never complains. So I guess he is well. I love him so much.

Having a dog has improved my life so much. He is six now, so I have had him a little over five years. We got him in may 2006. And he was a year old then. He was going to be a breeding dog but the breeder decided she didn’t want to get into breeding long haired dachshunds, so she sold him to me at a year old for less money because he was going to get the snip and be a pet. And he has been a lovely pet. The only complaints I have about him is that he pees and poos everywhere and barks too much. Some people would find this too much to deal with, but I accept him as a barky and pee-ey/poo-ey guy. I do want to train it out of him of course, but it’s taken a while. He only goes in certain spots anyway.

BUT in terms of love and companionship, he has proven himself to be necessary for my mental well being. Because the basement feels haunted and Mister is a dog with the capability to push away bad spirits, I always take him to bed with me for snuggles and general ghost busting. Just having a little soul on the bed seems to ward away the bad juju. And also when I feel lonely I like picking him up and kissing him.

Also because sometimes my illness makes me think of bad things, like animal torture (be it through fur farms or some other terrible thing like factory farming) I like having a small animal I can curl up with in my arms and just love unconditionally. When bad thoughts get in my head of animal suffering, I like to snuggle my little dog and think how I will keep him safe through his whole life from bad things. I want him to die a very old dog with a very sweet life.

Little Mister is in bed with my Mom right now. I’ve started letting him go to bed with her and then picking him up just before I go to sleep. It makes him happy, he gets tired way before me anyway.

After saying all this stuff about animal welfare, you might be surprised to find out I want to taste Kangaroo while I am in Australia. I hear it’s like venison. I am hoping I have a chance to taste it if I hang out with the right people. The indigenous people. We’ll see.

Oh, and my cousin is back from his journey to the offsale! I should go find out what happened!

This whole blog isn’t actually going to be about lies I tell myself. Because I realize I have to give an update on What Happened to Deanna.

Deanna had an interesting conversation with a police officer and then an interesting conversation with some people in an ambulance and is right now in the hospital, and has been there for a little over a week. We found out through the Vancouver Police. So she’s in a safe place, and I’m mostly concerned with her health and what she will do after she is released. I hope she’s done camping with Occupy just because I think it’s better for bipolar folks who need proper sleep to spend her nights with a roof over her head and a decent bed with enough blankets. My first manic episode was escalated in part to the fact I was sleeping on a thin skinny child’s bed for weeks and weeks. Also all that effexor pushed me over.

That’s the thing, people want to blame the pot for me being crazy but my use has been pretty consistent for years and the main things that caused my manic episodes was all that effexor and the second time it was me going off my meds. Oh yeah and both times I went crazy I was also falling in love and THAT fucks me over sometimes. Love is really stressful. I think I could fall in love now and not get all fucked up though, because I’m on meds that work.

My antipsychotics are SO POWERFUL that they render the effects of mushrooms to absolutely nil! There’s absolutely no point in me doing psychedelics anymore. So I don’t.

I guess it’s a good sign. Especially since if I run out of meds or forget too many days in a row I start hearing music in the white noise. Ooooh I hate that feeling!!! I KNOW deep in my heart of hearts that I am hearing it because I am CRAZY and sometimes I strain really hard to hear English words in it, but I never do. I’m not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. The only thing that reassures me is knowing I at least have the insight still to resume taking my medication as soon as I am due for the next dose. Whew!

Life’s crazy when you’re a crazy person. Weird shit happens.

Oh yeah, but lies I tell myself.

There are some lies I tell myself, to try and make myself be better. One of them is that if I quit smoking, my ex will take me back and we will have a real relationship finally with long range plans and a King sized bed and a blended family of cats and dog. With such a great fantasy reward, you would think I would have quit smoking by now. But it’s not true, which I know, so it hasn’t really made me as committed to quitting. I should really be focused on my main concern about smoking, which is that I don’t want to get cancer and die a painful death relatively young. I would like to make it at least to 70! 80 even! After that I don’t care. Geriatric chronic conditions suck. Alzheimer’s, Osteoporosis, ugh! But I can at least do all I can now to be healthy. I already do so much just to have proper brain health. But then I smoke and could blow out an artery in my brain with a stroke and be dead or crippled. Aaaaaaaaah! I WANT TO QUIT! It’s not worth the little buzz you get. Cigarettes deaden taste and smell and make me less kissable. Wah!

What other lies do I tell myself?

I tell myself that I just have to make amazing art and everyone will want to give me money and help me live as a full time artist. But that’s not true either. I don’t know many people who can live as full time artists.

Today my mom asked me, “What would be better for you? To have a job or to have your own business?” And I said “I think to have my own business because then I can take time off to go do residencies and stuff.” And I think it’s true. I really have to do some cpr on my fledgling business. I need some clients. That’s really the only thing in my way. I should get some cards made.

I might be digitizing some material for someone soon. That would be good, I could get a bit of money into my business bank account.

I tell myself all kinds of lies about how I could be a better person to be an appropriate partner for my ex, but it’s all so ridiculous. Quitting smoking is the least of them. I also think about doing grand projects like making a feature film with some underpaid actors and my video camera and entering it into Cannes and winning the Palm D’Or. And I think to myself “That will show her I have ambition!” And in my head I am shaking my little fist heavenward.

My Mom recently told me Lady Gaga lives with her parents too, even though she has all this money. I think she is telling me that to make me feel less weird about living in her house. And now also living with my cousin Steven and his kid. It’s a multigenerational household! :O

I feel dubious as to how many dates I can realistically score while I am living at home. I’m allowed to bring girls home, I have in the past, I don’t feel weird about it. But the ladies feel weird about it. That’s what I think, anyway.

I think I will fail at bettering myself if I am just chasing an elusive relationship that’s never going to happen. I need to be more focused on making my life count whether or not someone else is in it.

So Deanna hasn’t posted anything on facebook in a while. And I don’t really know where she is. It’s kind of a concern, although last night someone saw her at a rally. So she’s sort of AWOL. I don’t know what’s up. Le sigh!

Last night I had this intensely emotional dream, in a good way. And I woke up and was all goofy and smiley for a while. And then I remembered none of it was real and was disappointed. But I got over it. I like being entertained while I am sleeping.

I went to Partner’s In Employment because it’s a condition of me being on Welfare, and they offered to let me do a Vocational Evaluation which takes about two weeks and will tell me what jobs I am suited for. It’s in January – February. Until then I am just going to hang on and keep poking around for jobs of some sort. Or freelance creative various things. We’ll see. I still have to make this super 8 film too!

I can’t think properly at this hour or with this much alcohol in me.

It is weird being in love with someone who loves me back but doesn’t want to be with me. I always thought love was enough, but it’s NOT! :O Once my mom told me about how she used to ask the universe to bring her a man to fall in love with but they would turn out to have some glaring issue like being married technically or being gay all the way or other things and eventually she gave up asking the universe to bring her a man to love because it was like the universe was finding every loophole to sabotage it. That’s how I feel! Oh man. You have to be so specific when you ask the universe for something.

I’m a weirdo. That’s probably the problem! Also I smoke, which is another problem. But really truly I am going to quit for good soon. I did a whole month recently, like in September or something.

I should go to bed. Maybe I will have another nice dream.

One day I hadn’t heard from my cousin Deanna for a couple days, maybe less even, and I commented on a mutual friend’s post about not wanting to die on Hastings. And I just said something like “Me neither.” And then Deanna posted on it “Yeah I am in Van and I totally avoid that area.” And I was like WTF???? Because she hadn’t said goodbye or anything. I thought it was a joke.

But no, she spent her last dollars on a bus ticket and is now living at Occupy Vancouver!!!! :O

That’s really far away! She did say if she got the chance she was going to be in Vancouver, so I guess that is what she did. It seems crazy! Everyone is worried because Occupy Vancouver has a 2pm deadline tomorrow to get out “or else!” Well, I don’t think they said “or else” but it was implied, and they’re going to throw their stuff away. And do I don’t know what with the people.

So here I am, powerless in Saskatoon while Deanna goes off to save the world. I could point her to some people in Vancouver who know how to live on next to nothing there and where the free food is, but she is all about the movement right now. I’m just worried it will totally disperse and she’ll be homeless in Vancouver, which is way more of a fuck show than being homeless in Saskatoon, where she knows a lot of people. And call me crazy but all the chanting in all the occupy videos remind me of that film we watched on cults in high school where the fresh faced hero gets brainwashed to the shouts of “Juicyfruit, juicyfruit! Rah rah rah!” I have mixed feelings about Occupy.

So you can call me PreOccupied.

She will probably be fine, she hates when people worry. And who knows, maybe she will end up in a Vancouver jail cell with drag marks on her legs. Or maybe the people will prevail and it will all be a heartwarming scene with heroic Occupiers waving their fists in front of the VAG, free to live another night on the front lawn.

Occupy the VAG!!!

Hopefully she will be fine and have some crazy adventure story to tell her children, when she has some. And it’s true I know people who have up and moved to Vancouver and made it work. It’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that she will land on her feet. She’s been fed for free this far! And she’s been there a while now.

I guess the grim underbelly of Vancouver is what I worry about, it’s so ridiculously expensive to live there and the occupations that will allow you to live reasonably decently there are sketchy. And plus all the free food places are in sketched out neighborhoods. I dunno. But what do I know, it’s been five years since I’ve lived in Vancouver, six almost, and it has changed a lot in the meantime. Maybe there’s a magical Quatchi’s Inn where poor people can go to eat and sleep and smoke weed in their bedrooms for no money. Well whatever. And now I am going to be in trouble for writing a worrywart blog post.

I just don’t want to have to fly out to Vancouver and put up posters of her. But I have felt that about all my native girl cousins who live in BC. It’s just not a good place to be a Native woman, considering how many go missing there. But yes, I lived there, and only had one really dodgy night with some crazy old punk and his roommate he was kicking out who had pitbulls. Oh yeah, and that one old lady who called me a pedophile in the street because she mistook me for someone else. Okay, and that guy with the blood on him who said “Canada~!” at me and shook his bloody nose on my shirt. That was sketchy too.

But there are also lots of good people in Vancouver. It’s just a big city with big city problems. But Deanna has never lived in a big city before. But neither did I before I was 18. And she’s way older than I was when I moved there.

Ha ha, listen to me be an old fuddy duddy! We’ll just have to see what happens tomorrow at 2pm.

Life got in the way of me continuing to write. First I had five days of drinking in a row, and I am not sure how I did that but I managed and felt pretty gross after. Such a binge! And I didn’t even mean to binge, it’s just people kept inviting me out or else I was home drinking with my cousin or else there was wine with dinner. Either way, it made me feel like a deficient writer because everyone was like “You can’t write when you are drunk!” Although I kind of think I have in the past.

So whatever, I drank and didn’t write and now I have taken a couple days off but got a six pack and now I am writing again. And tipsy. AND I DON’T CARE!

Ha ha, no, I probably do care I just don’t want to talk about it.

You know something I realized about my marijuana use is that I do use it medically pretty much. I know all these people say marijuana is bad for crazy people, but there is also some pretty good research that indicates some active parts of marijuana help people with bipolar disorder. And although SOME people don’t handle marijuana well mentally, SOME people also don’t tolerate the same psychiatric medication I am on, for whatever reason. It’s like all psych type meds, not effective for everyone but for some it’s really good.

I dunno. I just know I am not grouchy when I have it and I feel a bit more even. And for someone with a mood disorder, “even” is a great state to be in. Not all teetertotery and shit.

I did hear about a doctor who will actually prescribe medical marijuana in this area, which surprised me because so few will. I’m still waiting to hear the results of the study Cannibinoids in Bipolar Affective Disorder so I can take it with me and say “See!” Or not take it.

WHat else? I am getting used to this multigenerational extended family household. Currently I live with my Mom, my Cousin Steven, and half time his son Kristjan. It’s a pretty full house! It’s been strange adjusting, but I have lived with Steven and Mom before, after Steven got assaulted in this fucked up house he was living in where there was a weed whacker murder in the garage!

Oh man, I totally walked away and got distracted.

It’s an hour after the end of November 6th and I have surpassed my goal of getting 7000 words done, I am now sitting at a comfortable 8014 words. Still behind the daily goals, I didn’t write at all for a few days because I didn’t know what to write, and then I wrote over five thousand words yesterday. I stayed up until five in the morning doing it and totally fucked myself over because at Noon we had to go out and finish dropping off Judy Junor’s leaflets. We also did some Data Entry at the Campaign Office this afternoon, and then we had dinner with my cousin and her boyfriend and visited for a bit, so I had a really late start on my writing. But I made it! 😀 I am going to work really hard on getting it all out.

I’ve decided to write about my lived experiences with Bipolar. I went to a coffeeshop on Saturday afternoon and wrote for a few hours and then came home and typed it up. I had just typed in the last word when my foot hit the power bar and it shut the computer down. What followed was some loud swearing and frantic messing about trying to get the computer to work. The computer was being really slow starting up because it had been turned off so rudely. It kept freezing at the login screen and making me anguished. I had written three pages! Nooooo! I didn’t want to spend an hour retyping the whole thing again. But lucky for me the auto recovery worked and I only had to retype the last paragraph.

I’m behind in where I should be, I should have finished 10,002 words today to be on target for getting 50,000 by the end of the month. But I can do some more marathon writing sessions. I wrote about when I got my heart broken and made myself cry. Which is funny, because I cry so rarely. It was cathartic I think. It was a silent cry, tears streaming down my face as I tickety tacked typed. It was good, even though it gave me a big lump in my throat.

I’m excited to be writing, although I know it’s all jumbled up and will need some revisions once the month is up. I’ve never tackled such a huge goal in such a short time. I’ve got sixteen pages now, although it is divided up into chapters so a couple pages only have one paragraph on them.

Tonight I was standing outside smoking and thinking and remembered that I am (if all goes according to plan) going to Australia and Germany next spring and summer respectively. BIG TRIPS! I have never been to Australia before, and I am pretty excited. This blog is one of the things that is going to be featured as part of the reason I am out there, along with some videos. I’ve never had anyone want to show my blog as a valid art project. I’m curious how it will be received.

Oh man my back aches, I am not sitting right when I write, I write all hunched over and fuck myself over. I need to practice better writing posture, more relaxed writing posture.

I need to fall in love again, with someone new who is actually a possibility. I’m tired of being in love with someone who doesn’t want to be with me, even if she does love me. I will always love her, but I need a more active love, someone who wants to have sex and live together and get married and have back rubs and who I can take care of and who will take care of me until we are both dead and cremated. I’d like to have a girlfriend I can introduce to my grandparents, because they are in their 90’s and on the way out and I really want them to meet a sweetheart of mine. They never have met any of my other lovers.

I’m thinking of doing Script Frenzy in April, where you write a script all month, it’s an offshoot of NaNoWriMo. Although I might be in Australia for a couple of weeks then and spending time in another country writing doesn’t appeal to me when I could be doing a bunch of other things. They also have a challenge where they invite you to tackle a big life goal over the course of a year. I am thinking of giving that a shot, but I have no ideas what I want to do.